Suffocating under the weight of the rain as it pours down, saturating, permeating every shadow and hollow, puddles of water tinging red as streams of blood twist and flow through. Some of it's their blood. Some of it's mine. I manage to raise my face a little from the wet stones of the alley, feeling a blade slash along the bone underneath my eye. How long have I been out? Minutes? Days? Who knows? Through the rain and mist and miasma I can just make out the shape of my hand in its iron-banded glove, lying a world of two feet of me. I try to move it, and the fingers twitch, but there's no strength to raise the arm ... was I shot there? I don't know. My memory's gone again. This is a bad sign.
Eyes travel down along the ground, trying to focus through the haze of pain and of reality, agony creeping in on the edges of my vision as a tangible blurring, rain turning to mist as it spatters on the street, droplets impacting against the stone and exploding into thousands of water particles. I know the distortion is shock-induced, but it doesn't help. Straining my eyes, I make out the forms of corpses by the shape of the rain spray. My handiwork? I can't be sure. I think I feel bullet holes, just under my ribs, that telltale penetrating cold of winter air infiltrating your guts. Am I leaking stomach acid onto my lungs and intestines right now? Or is that feeling just a gust of cold wind? With my huge cloak torn and wrapped around me, I can't see my torso to make sure. Fuck.
That bit of awareness manages to squeeze another drop out of my adrenaline, which I can tell has been pumped dry for a long time. What the fuck have I been doing here? This looks like a normal gunfight, but something doesn't seem right ..... . Ever since that mark on my arm started growing, my life has gone to pieces. Crazy shit has been happening left and right, but most annoying of all, my memory has begun to shatter whenever it gets a mind to. Putting it back together is a long and torturous process; the answers don't come to me for a long time.
If they come at all..
The adrenaline starts to seep in. The miasmatic cloud around my brain fades from opaque to merely translucent, and I manage to get a better hold on things. I feel the torrent of rain battering my cloak to my back, the unevenly paved stones of the alley against my face and stomach, and establish that I am lying facedown. I don't have the strength yet to raise myself, but that knowledge will be useful when the time comes. Instead I close my eyes to the landscape of washed-out blue for the night and the rain and the thick curling darkness for the blood, trying to collect my mental resources. I try very hard to remember.
Lying in the rain, I think. Lying in the rain. facedown in a back alley, bodies nearby, blood on the cobblestones. Where did I come from to get to here? The one memory that always stands out is when I got the mark, that black twisting stain that's caused this whole mess, but I ignore that. It's always the same memory, whether it's the day after, months afterwards, or maybe even years down the road, so I search for the last thing I remember.
This time, I can take the bits and pieces of the thread of my disintegrating life and trace them up until 5:00 in the morning, on the 4th of Sagitarrius, year 961. Six months after I was stained. That could be yesterday morning, last week, or last month. Maybe it was 20 years ago, and I'm 46 years old now without even realizing it. There really is no way to tell for certain. There's just no way.
A train, I remember. I was on a train then, a steamer. I can picture the inside of the car around me. First class compartment. I'm hidden in the reds and shadows of my cloak with my hat down low, providing an amusing shiver of fear for the decaying hollows of nobility in the car with me. I am on my way to a meeting, I remember. A job. A new client. Kestrel City. They have paid my fare for the train. My boots come off the table's edge and drop to the floor as I lean forward and pick up the liquor flask in front of me. The window in seat across from me, on the other side of the train, shatters in a deafening crash. And then everything goes dark up until now.
My experience and residual memory tell me that it will start coming to me in vague flashes as I pick myself up and go on with my life. Sometimes everything comes back, and things continue on without much of a hitch. Sometimes I never really understand what happened to me over the days or weeks I lost. And from the blank slate I am currently encountering in the back corners of my mind, things don't look promising. I'm very experienced with memory loss by now, but I've never felt anything this opaque, this ... futile. It's as if I were sucked into a portal at 5:00 AM, Sagittarius 4th, 961, and deposited here. I have nothing - no flashes, no vague tremors, not even encouragment. Everything is blank. This is bad.
Dimly, I realize that trying to think back could be like this every time, and I wouldn't remember it.
